1981

​1981 The Modern Bucolics2015 SOLD for $ 37M including premium

In early 1981, success is immediate for Jean-Michel Basquiat. His fame soon transcends borders and Emilio Mazzoli invites him for an exhibition in Modena in May and June.

Jean-Michel painted during the trip. His mixed techniques on canvas 221 x 401 cm starring in life size a character and a cow is even his largest artwork from that seminal year as if he already desired to escape Annina Nosei's basement.

This work entitled The field next to the other road sounds like a holiday souvenir for the young artist who discovers Italy. On the left, it is typical of the already favorite themes of Jean-Michel through that thorn-crowned man with visible skeleton and full sex.

The cow on the right looks like a child's drawing with her innocent gaze and big udder. The line drawing is filled with colors but the artist avoids as always the classical artistic language: the color of one of the legs of the beast is outside the line drawing.

Made in a country with an incomparable artistic past, this painting is a fresco on the theme of life (milk) and death (bones) by a very young man eager for thrills and glory. The field is estimated $ 25M for sale by Christie's in New York on May 13, lot 55B.

​1981 Taggers and Policemen​2017 SOLD for $ 35M including premium

Suddenly at ease in 1981 thanks to the support of Annina Nosei, Jean-Michel Basquiat views his future as one of the greatest African-American heroes.

Real life is not so simple. Segregation remains latent in the high society and street artists considered as mere vandals are mercilessly pursued by the police. We cannot blame him for this fear of the cops : two years later one of his friends will be killed in a muscled police intervention.

Whether white or black the policeman is an enemy of his freedom. Jean-Michel makes some caricature portrait paintings of these brutes who maintain the public order. By defiance and by support of his friends who remain in the street, he adds on the back wall some inscriptions appearing as hastily written. In a later phase of his career these often incomprehensible messages will become preponderant.

A 182 x 121 cm panel adorned with the remarkable IRONY OFNEGROPLCEMN tag was sold for £ 8.2M including premium by Phillips de Pury on June 28, 2012.

On May 17 in New York, Christie's sells a panel of same size painted with acrylic and oilstick which is one of the rare examples in the art of Jean-Michel where the character is a white man. It is estimated $ 22M, lot 55 B.

This policeman is a massive man with broad shoulders whose function is recognizable in his uniform and kepi. The mouth is open in a cry and the gaze is bloody. On the wall the stylized drawing of a gaunt eagle is a mocking symbol of the federal authority. Below the eagle the tag LA HARA appears four times as a challenge inspired from 'La jara' meaning the cops in Puerto-Rican slang.

​1981 The Warrior from the Street2014 SOLD 35 M$ including premium

At the beginning of 1981, the enigmatic SAMO, a young artist from the streets of New York, participated in an exhibition in Queens. This will be the year of his fame under his real name, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

On May 13 in New York, Christie's sells one of his earliest paintings on canvas, 173 x 262 cm, lot 36 in the catalog, estimated $ 20M. This work includes everything that we may imagine from the street art by SAMO : large size, strident colors, war symbols, fierce humor. The mixing of techniques has already reached its top level of efficiency : acrylic, oil stick, metallic spray enamel.

The warrior is crowned and sexual, with organs visible by transparency. In attack position, he is by one hand Jupiter brandishing the lightning and by the other hand a rebel crusader wielding the sword. The claws of the feet reinforce the doubts about his belonging to mankind.

Unlike other paintings of the same period, this one is sprinkled with wild and incomprehensible words which are martial onomatopoeia (TAR TAR TAR ) or lyrical tunes (OEOEE). Later, such strange expressions shall almost always enhance the social revolt of his characters.

This painting has certainly been made ​​in the studio arranged for Jean-Michel in the basement of Annina Nosei, who sold the artwork in the following year.

POST SALE COMMENT

This seminal Basquiat was sold for $ 35M including premium.

​1981 Artistic Miracle in a Basement2012 SOLD 26.4 M$ including premium

In 1981, Annina Nosei offered to a very young street artist a place to work in the basement of her gallery in New York. The result certainly exceeded the intention. Who could really predict that the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat would be within a few months the first strong representation of angers and hopes of the abandoned of the society?

The mystery of the instant makeover of Jean-Michel at Nosei does not stay in the grammar of his figuration, whose originality was already recognizable in his graffiti. It is the amazing technical mastery that he suddenly demonstrated for large formats which he had never practiced.

Jean-Michel was already mastering his drawing which he applied in increasingly detailed layers. And he also mastered color, executed in oilstick, acrylic and spray enamel applied with a spontaneity that would have pleased the abstract expressionists.

We do not know the exact day of the works made ​​by Basquiat in Nosei basement but the canvas, 198 x 173 cm, for sale by Christie's in New York on December 14, is known as one of the first.

The fisherman is standing with his black body revealing the skeleton. He wears a crown of thorns and a halo of the same nature. The huge fish is hanging from the line. Basquiat is a threat to the well-meaning art of his time, and the fish could be a voodoo poison taken out of water by a new ambiguous god.

Christie's had convinced us that this painting is a key work of early Basquiat art: $ 26.4 million including premium.

​1981 Birth of the Black American Social Art2012 SOLD 12.9 M£ including premium

Christie's has coined the right sentence to position Jean-Michel Basquiat in the history of art: he is the first black American modernist to transcend the white establishment.

The date, 1981, is favorable, thirteen years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Society is changing. The Street art, derived from the punk movement, challenges the conventions.

Basquiat had a very good knowledge of contemporary art with its shocks of strident colors. In the street, he painted on any medium. His creativity explodes when the Annina Nosei gallery provides him the opportunity to work in studio, on large canvases.

The painting for sale in Londonon June 27, 200 x 183 cm, has been acknowledged as a masterpiece of Basquiat when it was sold $ 14.6 million including premium at Sotheby's on May 15, 2007.

Made shortly before New York City discovered the art of Basquiat, it shows a hybrid character, lifesize, the mixture of a mystic deity with a crown of thorns and of the powerful Black boxing champion in the attitude of triumph. The heavyweight boxing was the first sport, and even the first social field, where blacks dominated whites beyond doubt.

The estimate is not advertised in the catalog but, as they often do for the most outstanding lots, Christie's let their expectations leaking: around $ 20M. Here is the link to the catalog.

POST SALE COMMENT

Success seemed assured for this exceptional artwork, clearly one of the masterpieces of Basquiat. It is achieved: £ 12.9 million including premium.

​1981 The Mystical Year of Jean-Michel Basquiat2012 SOLD 16.3 M$ including premium

In 1981, New York discovered Basquiat. He is 21 years old, has already made graffiti and noise rock and played hisown role as a street child in an underground movie, and his artistic skill is exciting Warhol.

His growing fame enables him to develop his art. He works in the basement of the Nosei gallery which supplies him with the large size canvases and panels on which he expresses his revolt.

His major works of that year are mystical. The unique character deifies the emigrant black. As towering as a saint by El Greco, he is naked and sexed, with above his head a halo of thorns which is a reminder of the artist's education.His skin is made in two colors, in memory of his double Haitian and Puerto Rican origin, and transparent to revealthe ribs.

Despite his humble origins, Basquiat had a consistent knowledge of modern art. He used jointly acrylic, oilstick and spray paints for his violent chromatic effects assorted with subtle shades.

A canvas, 200 x 183 cm, with a larger than life character, was sold $ 14.6 million including premium by Sotheby'son May 15, 2007. Another one, 177 x 199 cm, sold $ 11.2 million including premium by Phillips de Pury on May 15, 2008, shows a fallen angel, perhaps the best evidence that these figures are not self-portraits but rather the expression of a mystical outsider culture.

On May 10in New York, Phillips de Pury sells a painting on wood, 186 x 125 cm, estimated $ 8M. The character is visible as a whole (in every meaning of the word ...). Here is the link to the catalog.

Now money is arriving. A few months later, Basquiat leaves Nosei and tastes the combined effects of luxury and drugs. The following year his iconography is diversifying, becoming more difficult to decode.

POST SALE COMMENT

This outstanding painting is a key to the art of Basquiat. It was sold $ 16.3 million including premium.

1981 Gaiety in the Grassland by Huang Zhou2013 SOLD 130 M RMB yuan including premium by Poly

​1981 Equality through Sport2015 SOLD for $ 11.5M including premium

When he became a major artist in 1981 through a continuous access to large formats that enable him to fully exploit his control of techniques and colors, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 21 years old, did not neglect his social struggle.

Top-level sport offers to the Black champions their revenge against racial inequality. By showing the triumph, Jean-Michel deliberately confuses the athlete and the warrior. An untitled painting where the award to the black champion is the mystical crown of thorns was sold for £ 12.9M including premium by Christie's on June 27, 2012.

Painted during the same glorious year, World crown, 122 x 142 cm, is a pearl in the art of Jean-Michel, for two reasons.

This is a very rare example where two boxers are in full action. The stylized figures do not prevent the expression of strength and aggressiveness, quite the contrary. These fighting guys form the single theme of this image.

Above all, the battle is run between a white and a black. The title of world champion is at stake. A crown with three points will be attributed to each of the competitors and none is taking advantage in this remarkable symbol of racial equality through sport.

World crown is estimated $ 7M for sale by Sotheby's in New York on May 12, lot 27.

On the following year, Jean-Michel returns to an exclusive glorification of a black athlete. The crown with three points is now firmly on the head of a baseball player who is certainly Hank Aaron. This artwork titled Orange sports figure was sold for £ 4.1 million including premium by Sotheby's on February 15, 2012.

​1981 Basquiat Disturbed by Cops2012 SOLD 8.2 M£ including premium

Fans and exegetes of Jean-Michel Basquiat are encouraged to focus their analyses on the sensational year, 1981, when he left the streets to express his fantasies, revolts and hopes on classic pictorial supports of large size.

Capable of a remarkable artistic synthesis expressed in his so specific violent style, Basquiat appears as post-punk in his mystical art where black deities defy the established order of whites.

We can also see Basquiat as post-hippie when he is addressing more socially oriented themes, such as the relationship of people of the street with police. This is a remake of the stories of cops and robbers, where the defender of the established order appears as a stubborn brute.

If he is white, the policeman is a skeleton without soul. If he is black, he is a bully in uniform, ready to indiscriminately kick his brothers of race.

An acrylic and oilstick on wood, 183 x 122 cm, estimated £ 6M, for sale on June 28 in London by Phillips de Pury,leaves no doubt about the revolt of the artist. Showing the black police officer in the role of the traitor, it has a revealing title in the form of a clever tag written in haste by one of these invisible heroes of the street: IRONY OFNEGROPLCEMN.POST SALE COMMENT

This painting so close to the genuine expression of street art was sold £ 7.25 million hammer price.Just before, a surprise result was awarded to Olympics, a joint work by Warhol and Basquiat: £ 6 million hammer price.

​1981 Poetry according to Twombly​2017 SOLD for $ 8.3M including premium

Looking for a total art Cy Twombly includes poetry. Writers translate and transmit the passions since the antique times. Following Mallarmé the meaning of the words is less important than their position in the page and their own musicality.

Twombly paints poems without words that may be assembled in a volume. Poems to the Sea, a set of 24 pages painted on paper in 1959, was sold for $ 21.7 million included premium by Sotheby's on November 13, 2013 over a lower estimate of $ 6 million.

The proto-writing phase on blackboards around 1970 did not stop his literary quest. In the mystical book Silex Scintillans written in 1650 by Henry Vaughan, Twombly selects the short poem The Storm where the author attempts a comparison close to pantheism between the violence of the weather projecting waters in the air and the passionate bubbling of his own blood.

This storm both external and internal is illustrated by Twombly in 1981 in oil, wax crayon, colored pencil and graphite on three uneven sheets of paper : 149 x 132 cm for the central page and 100 x 71 cm for each lateral page. The title Silex Scintillans is handwritten by the artist at the top of the left page which is the right place in a traditional reading.

This entirely abstract work is realized in a mingling of curved lines comparable to the mythological abstractions of the 1960s, using bright colors that intertwine their more or less spontaneous energy.

The triptych is estimated $ 5M for sale by Sotheby's in New York on May 18, lot 6. Please watch the video shared by Sotheby's in which a voice reading The Storm accompanies the exploration of the colored details of the artwork.

​1981 Richter could not Walk on Water2012 SOLD 4.3 M£ including premium

PRE SALE DISCUSSION

In 1972, Gerhard Richter has dark thoughts. Impressed by the tragic landscapes of Caspar David Fridrich, he makes a trip to Greenland to see how nature can crush men.

By photographing the endless sea, Richter ponders the ever changing forms of these floating blocks, their inaccessibility, these shades of gray that hardly separate the three elements : the low sky, the frozen water, the hostile iceberg.

Richter's work is of total variety, and he is everywhere a pioneer. He appears here as a precursor of the minimalist photography of Gursky and Sugimoto, but he is also very close to the apocalyptic world of Yves Tanguy.

In 1981, Richter copies this picture in an oil on canvas of small dimensions for this artist, 70 x 100 cm. This paintingis estimated £ 2M, for sale by Sotheby'sin London on February 15. Here is the link to the catalog.

Thirty years have passed. By the quality of his artistic creation, by the depth of his meditation, Gerhard Richter is now considered as the best painter of current time.

POST SALE COMMENT

Very good result, £ 4.3 million including premium, for this atypical painting that will have a deep interest for the historians of Richter's art.